Lorna Bradbury highlights the best illustrated stories showing how babies are
made.

Q My son, who is three, has been asking how babies are made. “How did I get in there? Did you eat me?” is a frequent inquiry. Are there any books you’d recommend?

David, via email

A The guiding principle on matters of sex education, whatever the age of the child, is to answer simply and directly whatever is asked but not to give more information than the child demands.

So you need to listen carefully to the question. As Sophie Dauvois, a former biologist and co-creator of the children’s science comic Okido, told me recently, it might be that a child isn’t asking for a biology lesson at all: “If a child asks where he came from, he might just mean a hospital in central London.”

In the case of your son, the fact that he has phrased that question so directly suggests he is likely to be ready for a full answer, and may even have worked some of it out himself.

There are plenty of good books for this age group – and plenty too for older children, which I’ll race through at the end. These books differ in how explicit they are, so it’s important you’re familiar with the contents of what you’re reading before you start.

The best fictional stories are Babette Cole’s Mummy Laid an Egg! and Where Willy Went… by Nicholas Allan (both Red Fox), which present the facts of life in irreverent stories.

In Mummy Laid an Egg!, the parents of a pair of couch potatoes announce it’s time for them to be told how babies are made. There follows a series of silly scenarios – that babies are delivered by dinosaurs or found under stones or shoot out of exploding eggs – before the children decide to take over and deliver the lecture themselves. “Mummy does have eggs. They are inside her tummy,” says the girl, pointing to her drawing. “And daddy has seeds in seed pods outside his body,” says the boy. The children talk us through a simple sketch of the two bodies, complete with an arrow saying “This fits in here”. And there’s a spread that replicates four sexual positions – or, as Cole has it, “some ways in which mummies and daddies fit together”.

It is all very jolly, but its candour will not be suitable for every child – or for every parent. The kama sutra spread particularly, which caused some disquiet when the book was shortlisted for the Smarties prize in 1993, is something I would think twice about sharing with my kids.

Where Willy Went… tells the story of a sperm called Willy who, along with 300 million other sperm, lives inside Mr Browne. It's a funny story, which again wears its biology lightly, including explanatory “maps” of Mr and Mrs Browne’s genitalia. And the big moment itself is rather more discreetly conveyed. “That very night Mr and Mrs Browne joined together. The teacher cried, ‘Go’ and the Great Swimming Race began.” This is accompanied by a sketch of the pair doing the deed under the bedcovers.

Moving on to the illustrated factual books, How Are Babies Made? by Alastair Smith (Usborne) covers the baby’s journey in the womb from conception to birth, and passes lightly over the matter of sexual intimacy itself, as does Our Baby Inside by Mick Manning and Brita Granström (Franklin Watts), in which you lift the flaps to see the baby growing inside the woman. (Their other book, How Did I Begin? is more explicit, including an illustration of parents having a “cuddle”.)

If you’d like a more general introduction to the human body rather than a book which focuses on babies, I’d strongly recommend My Head-to-Toe Body Book (Thames & Hudson), a spin-off from the Okido comics, which includes a spread on babies, or Who Has What? by Robie H Harris and Nadine Bernard Westcott (Walker) about the differences between boys and girls.

For older children, Babette Cole’s Hair in Funny Places (Red Fox) does for puberty what Mummy Laid an Egg! does for babies, and Let’s Talk About Sex by Robie H Harris and Michael Emberley (Walker) and Sex, Puberty and all that Stuff by Jacqui Bailey (Watts) are good illustrated reference books.

Please email your questions about children’s books to asklorna@telegraph.co.uk. You can follow @lornabradbury on Twitter